What Groove users need to do now that Microsoft is killing Groove Music Pass

Acknowledging that more customers prefer Spotify, Microsoft said it would discontinue its four-year-old Groove Music Pass service by the end of the year and shift its customers over to Spotify.

Microsoft won’t discontinue the related Groove Music app within Windows 10, which will still stream purchased and uploaded music stored on a user’s PC and on the OneDrive cloud service. But Groove Music Pass will go away as of 31 December. At that time, Groove Music will no longer stream from its Music Pass service.

Instead, Microsoft will ask users to connect its Groove Music service to a Spotify Premium account, which consumers will have to sign up for. When they do so, Microsoft will move any music that the Groove user has purchased over to Spotify. If you’ve purchased music from Groove that you don’t want to move to Spotify, though, make sure you download it – otherwise, you’ll lose it forever.

If you’ve purchased an annual subscription to Groove, though, there’s some good news: Microsoft will refund your money at 120%.

Though Microsoft was late to the game with some of the features that Spotify offers, such as curated music and recommendations, its Groove Music Pass evolved to offer a pretty competitive feature set. However, Groove never really differentiated itself that much from other music services. Pandora was built on algorithmic recommendations, and Apple’s music service tied into its iTunes legacy. Microsoft had to rebrand Xbox Music to Groove to demonstrate that it could be played on other platforms. Ironically, Groove’s only real claim to fame might have been its ties to the Forza Horizon 3 Xbox racing game, where your music was available through a channel on your FH3 car’s virtual radio.